3 Jason Blake

Hockey, Humour, and Play in Wayne Johnston’s The Divine Ryans

Many games are played most intensely by disturbed people; generally speaking, the more disturbed they are, the harder they play.

Eric Berne, Games People Play (1964)

The Divine Ryans is what some might describe as a “must-read.” Hockey fans will delight in references to Maurice Richard, Bobby Hull, and Gump Worsley, that maskless, wisecracking keeper who was always “so indignant when his defencemen allowed so much as one shot” (Johnston 1998, 126). Those who favour the highbrow can feast on allusions to Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and those who see hockey in religious terms can appreciate that the “apuckalypse” is nigh and that a sinful soul can become “‘puck black,’ so black that no amount of time in the fires of purgatory could cleanse it” (51). In short, Wayne Johnston’s 1990 novel goes beyond the conventional sports plot about winning the big game and beyond the tired hockey-literature theme of staging Canadianness.

In Johnston’s riotous yet sad novel, nine-year-old Draper Doyle Ryan is exiting childhood and learning about sexuality, death, and life in general. Hockey and humour provide him with comfort in a mirthless house belonging to one Philomena Clark (née Ryan), a woman who, for no apparent reason, barks “Don’t you smile at me” when she and Draper’s mother are looking in the same mirror (91). If Aunt Phil had her way, hers would be a household free of play and smiles. Draper and others who suffer under her are driven to “find release in laughter that subverts the discouragement of their circumstances” (Cook 2004, 129). There is, thus, a sorrow behind their laughter precisely because only fleetingly is Draper soothed by humour’s “quality of sudden lightness or lightening . . . which we may call levity” (Carroll 2014, 41). Draper does, however, have a key ally—his irreverent uncle Reginald, who masterfully uses puns, quips, and laughter as part of an emotional survival strategy.

In this chapter, I examine how hockey, humour, play, and learning converge in The Divine Ryans. More specifically, I explore how playfulness stokes Draper’s development even as it, like gallows humour, liberates him “temporarily from otherwise inescapable torment” (Lewis 1989, 80). I conclude by pondering the corruption of play and confronting the paradox of forced play—in particular, when Draper is coerced into boxing. Though Draper “wished there was nothing else to think about but hockey” (127), hockey and play are more than an escapist flight from real life: they help Draper make sense of his world. Phil and her ilk, meanwhile, use play and hockey to shame others.

A THEMATIC OVERVIEW

Johnston’s novel centres on a four-on-three grudge match between two sides of the Ryan family—on one team, Draper, his sister Mary, their mother Linda (née Delaney), and Uncle Reginald; on the other, the forbidding trio of Uncle Seymour, Aunt Louise, and Aunt Phil. At stake is the future of the Ryan family line. Aunt Phil’s squad misuses hockey and other forms of play, including the playfulness that fuels humour. For them, the aim is always one-upmanship, and they constantly seek extrinsic benefits that transcend the play world—that autotelic world that, ideally, has its purpose only within the game. Aunt Phil, who is particularly fond of seeing how soundly the “Catholic” Montreal Canadiens can trounce the “Protestant” Toronto Maple Leafs, is like an athlete who plays only for the salary, never for the sake of play itself. In contrast, Uncle Reginald uses hockey, play, and humour for healthy side effects—in particular, to help Draper grow and learn—but he never loses sight of the enjoyment to be found in the play spirit.

The novel is narrated by Draper Doyle Ryan, a confused boy whose father has recently died. Draper is the youngest male in a priest- and nun-rich family known in St. John’s, Newfoundland, as “the Divine Ryans.” Aunt Louise Ryan is a nun, Uncle Seymour Ryan is a priest, and Aunt Phil, a laywoman, is more Catholic than the Pope. Phil has little time for the modernizing reforms of Vatican II (1962–65), and years after her husband’s death, she remains a woman in black, having “embrace[d] widowhood as her vocation, her calling” (8). Moralistic, dreary, and mean, she drags Draper to wakes, because “boys [. . .] could never be reminded of their mortality too often” (115). Poor Draper. More crucial than Aunt Phil’s odd pedagogy, however, is her inability to laugh and enjoy herself, even when at play or involved in games.

The Divine Ryans tracks the year between the Stanley Cup games of 1966 and 1967, which is also the year following the death of Draper’s father. Donald Ryan, a closeted homosexual and newspaper editor, committed suicide shortly after his son caught him with another man, “engaged in what might have been some strange form of mimicry, their trousers down around their ankles” (184). The bewildered son cannot understand what he has seen, so he suppresses the memory of that encounter, just as he forgets the traumatic discovery of his father’s body a few days later. Aunt Phil, unaware that Draper had already seen the body, proclaims, “‘I found him first,’ [. . .] as if, by doing so, she had reclaimed him for the Ryans” (205).¹ Moreover, hoping to avoid any scandal through rumours of suicide or, worse (for her), homosexuality, Aunt Phil spreads the false news that a heart attack killed Donald. The aunt’s camouflaging story fits what Méira Cook calls the family’s “neurotic secrecy leading, inevitably, to repression” (2004, 122) and what Cynthia Sugars refers to as the Ryans’ urge to avoid the “embarrassment of . . . homosexuality” (2004, 156).

The Ryans are a family in decline. Former masters of a mini-empire that included “a marbleworks and a pair of flower shops” (Johnston 1998, 1), the mighty Ryans are now down to two businesses: a profitable funeral home and a spectacularly unprofitable newspaper. The newspaper, known in days gone by as The Daily Catholic Chronicle, depicts life as Aunt Phil sees it. In the words of the ribald Uncle Reginald, the Chronicle is now “the world’s worst newspaper,” “a mourning paper, [. . .] a paper in mourning for its own past greatness” (65). Having “ruined the careers of many a Protestant politician” (27), the vampiric newspaper now sucks the money and lifeblood of the Ryan family. To wit, the novel’s first line reads, “Our house must be sold to help keep The Daily Chronicle afloat” (1), the undertone being that the family itself is sinking, with the passive modal (“must be sold”) suggesting agentless inevitability, not a financial decision made by Aunt Phil.

So a mere five months after Donald Ryan’s suicide, Draper, his sister Mary, and their mother have to move in with domineering Aunt Phil—but also with Uncle Reginald, who lives in an attic apartment. Decked out in “his waistcoat and his top-hat” (25), Reginald drives the hearse for the family funeral home. For Phil, Seymour, and Louise, dapper and mirthful Reginald is “the embodiment of all that was wrong with Reg Ryan’s [Sr.]” funeral home (23). In other words, he’s a rare bright spot in Draper’s troubled world, which is marked by homelessness, death, funerals and wakes, and sexual trauma, including nightmares.

Draper, in addition to repeatedly seeing his father’s ghost (which is always holding a hockey puck), has disturbing dreams about the “Momary,” a satyr-like creature that frightens him into wetting his bed. “Half Mom, half Mary,” the Momary “was thirty-five years old above the waist and twelve years below it” (42). Johnston neatly inserts these sexual overtures into the plot line and develops them by having Uncle Reginald provide Draper with sessions of “oralysis.” He distinguishes oralysis from analysis for Draper, telling him that “[t]he job of an analyst was to take his patient seriously. The job of an oralyst was to make him laugh” (28). Such playful lines, crucial to the novel, highlight the freeing power of laughter while showing just how grim the rest of Draper’s life is. However, for all his puns and games, the oralyst Uncle Reginald helps Draper navigate his new life at Aunt Phil’s, recover the “missing week” of his father’s death, and begin to understand his surroundings as he inches towards puberty (8). Most importantly for Draper’s informal education, Reginald never talks down to his nine-year-old nephew.

Like many young hockey fans, Draper looks to the greats for inspiration. Before moving into Aunt Phil’s house, he decorated his bedroom with “pictures of all the goalies who had ever played for the Habs, a line of succession beginning with George Vezina [sic] and ending with Gump Worsley, the Gumper” (16). This “line of succession” announces a major theme of the novel: the need to produce a Ryan male to continue the family line. The goalie lineage neatly parallels the Ryan family’s lineage, a parallel made obvious when Draper later contemplates the portraits peering down from Aunt Phil’s walls. Draper’s new household is overseen by the patriarchal eyes of “Grandpa Stern, Grandpa Cross, Grandpa Grim, and Grandpa Disapproving,” as Reginald nicknames them (26). These nicknames are particularly biting, since grandfather, great-grandfather, and so on become interchangeable, generic “Grandpas,” united in their grimness. Grimmer still is the suggestion that sternness and crossness, like shortness, somehow runs in the Ryan blood. Grimmest of all is the prospect that one day Draper’s portrait might hang among them, for he is the “future of the family” (38), in charge of producing a male heir. This novel, then, is very much about “patrilineal genealogy” (Sugars 2004, 156).

Family and hockey are omnipresent and intertwined themes in The Divine Ryans. Indeed, Draper imagines the five Ryan siblings—Aunts Phil and Louise, Uncles Seymour and Reginald, and his father Donald—as a hockey team. After his father’s death, Draper muses, “All they lacked was a centreman. All they lacked [. . .] was my father, without whom they would be playing shorthanded from now on” (Johnston 1998, 158). Draper thus uses a hockey analogy to come to grips with his father’s absence: in other words, this fantasizing is not mere sports escapism.² However, the hockey comparison highlights a tragic gap, because Draper’s father is not serving a two- or five-minute penalty; he is gone forever. That infinite gap between “shorthanded” and “from now on” illustrates just how difficult it is for Draper to imagine nothingness, as he wrestles with a “world . . . suddenly coloured by his [father’s] absence” (Scruton 1996, 458).

Just as Draper uses hockey to understand loss, so too did his father, Donald, use the game as a teaching tool. Because Donald was always toiling for the Chronicle, working “impossibly long hours for next to no salary” (69), he rarely saw his son.³ Instead of bonding in any traditional hockey manner, Donald cultivated a textual relationship with the game and his son. When Draper was too young to stay up past the first period of Hockey Night in Canada, his father would use an inkless pen to etch game scores into the cover of Draper’s Cartoon Virgil: “At breakfast, after mass on Sunday mornings, I would put a sheet of paper over the book and shade it with a pencil until I found the score. ‘Here it comes,’ my father would say, ‘here it comes, emerging from the underworld’” (75). Even after Draper is old enough to watch all three periods, he continues the playful practice himself. He engraves the scores into his juvenile version of The Aeneid, and the book becomes a “kind of memory slate [. . .] for, in the process of trying to find the score of last night’s game, I would call up the scores of games played years ago” (75). Game results are linked to education because Draper must actively seek out the game information his father conceals for him.⁴ In this way, the Oxford-educated father introduces his son to the classics and teaches him, however unorthodoxly, to look closely at texts, even if the text is a simple hockey score. As discussed in more detail below, this playful and educational approach to hockey is the exact opposite of Aunt Phil’s and Father Seymour’s approach to playfulness and sport.

Draper’s decoding of “games played years ago” foreshadows the importance of reading documents from the past in order to figure out the present—specifically, documents related to the circumstances of his father’s death. In another instance of seeking a past truth from textual evidence, Draper scrutinizes a photograph from his father’s Oxford days, when Donald played with the Rhodes Blades. In that quirky team photo, the players sit around a fireplace, sporting blazers and wielding cigars, pipes, or brandy snifters—but they are also wearing skates: “They were all affecting the kind of insolence normal to such photographs, but also smirking slightly, not so much, it seemed to me, to acknowledge the obvious joke as to suggest that there was some further, private joke involved, some joke behind the joke, some riddle that they were daring you to solve” (157). A few pages later, Draper begins to fathom what the “presumably less innocent reader” (Cook 2004, 143) has already sensed. “The Rhodes Blades. The Gay Blades,” Draper muses. “I wonder if that was the real joke in that photograph” (Johnston 1998, 185). Donald and at least some of his teammates were playing a game of hide and seek, an as-if game of hiding in plain sight and daring the viewer to discover their secret, without actually furnishing evidence.

Eventually, Draper discovers that his father left him a more personal message. It was not by chance that Donald was clutching The Cartoon Virgil when Draper found his body (205). One year after his “missing week,” Draper remembers the incident, retrieves the book, and rubs a pencil over the cover: “The scores of games played years ago began appearing, emerging ghostly from the paper” (206). The words “emerging ghostly” echo the father’s playful erudite joke about scores “emerging from the underworld,” thereby hinting at a passing of duties from father to son (while also alluding to Aeneas’s journey to the Underworld to visit his father, Anchises, in Book VI of The Aeneid). Etched among the hockey scores is the suicide note that serves as crucial written proof of what Aunt Phil would deem the double sin of suicide and homosexuality. Donald’s heart-rending note reads, in part, “I have come to believe that there is no such thing as forgiveness. You will all be better off without me” (207)—words all the more tragic because Donald committed suicide convinced that he would face “eternal damnation” (193). Thanks to the unusual reading skills Donald taught his son, Aunt Phil’s fib about a heart attack is exposed. In exchange for keeping quiet about the suicide, Draper, Mary, and their mother are given enough money to allow them to leave the Ryan home and the confining family environs of St. John’s—driven to the airport “in style” (214) by Uncle Reginald in his hearse. As Cynthia Sugars puts it, Draper can actively “purchase his freedom by blackmailing his aunt Phil at the end of the novel” (Sugars 2004, 170).

HOCKEY AND THE PLAY SPIRIT

Hockey, as a game, is a potential source of fun and play. That said, sport and play are not synonyms, nor does a game necessarily engender enjoyment (as anyone who has played Monopoly knows). A game is determined by a set of formal or informal rules, while play is a vague and slippery concept that beggars description: as play theorist Brian Sutton-Smith observes, “We all know what playing feels like. But when it comes to making theoretical statements about what play is, we fall into silliness” (1997, 1). Performance theorist Richard Schechner sees play as a mood or disposition that gives us “refreshment, energy, unusual ways of turning things around, insights, breaks, openings and, especially, looseness” (2004, 42). Though an insightful and energizing mood may fall upon us at any time, the play mood is not entirely random. We are more likely to enjoy ourselves at a hockey game, for example, than while living in Aunt Phil’s house. In the case of Draper (as we shall see), enjoyment is much more likely during a hockey game than while boxing under the watchful eye of dour Uncle Seymour.

Uncle Seymour is not blessed with a playful disposition. A self-proclaimed hockey fan, he in fact knows nothing about the game, as becomes evident when he watches Hockey Night in Canada with Draper and the other Ryans. Worse, with support from Aunt Phil and Aunt Louise, Seymour ruins the communal fun that can come from watching a game in company. Phil, Louise, and Seymour are inept fans. Instead of concentrating on the game, they kibitz about the Toronto Maple Leafs being a Protestant team and amuse themselves over the plural form “Leafs,” mocking Protestants for choosing a team name that includes a spelling mistake (Johnston 1998, 79). Their joking reflects an obsessive intolerance, born of a sense of superiority.⁵ It is not harmless pre-game banter.

Father Seymour’s main hockey peccadillo, however, is that he exploits the game solely to achieve aims beyond the playing field. Rather than enjoying games and sports for their own sake, Father Seymour is radically instrumentalist in using them as a mirthless means to an end; for him, games are “essentially an instrument for some further purpose” (Suits 1978, 147) that lies beyond the game itself. When Father Seymour sits down beside Draper during a game for a heart-to-heart, the scene reads like a description of a creepy date: “‘Hello Draper Doyle,’ he said, sitting cross-legged beside me. He picked up my Pepsi and took a sip from it, and as if by this, some sort of bond had been established between us, laid his arm lightly on my shoulder” (Johnston 1998, 80). Seymour’s smarmy greeting is cryptically belated, coming as it does in the third period. Was it nervousness that made him wait so long to say hello? Was he planning and plotting? In any case, sitting cross-legged on the floor brings the priest no closer in age to his nephew, stealing Pepsi is no way to establish a bond of any sort, and the draping of an unrequested arm over a shoulder is a flagrant invasion of personal space. No emotional rapprochement or bonding moment ensues.

But Father Seymour’s real gaffe is to talk religion during the game. Though some Canadians may speak of hockey as a religion, mid-game sermonizing or theologizing is a bothersome incursion into the game-world. When Seymour asks, “Do you know what the CH on Montreal’s uniform stands for, Draper Doyle?” (the answer he wants is “church”), he ruins the playful mood. He follows his question with what Cook aptly describes as an “irritatingly pious disquisition” (2004, 133):

“But you know,” he said, “the word means nothing unless ‘u r’ in it.” I must have looked mystified, for he laughed. “Do you get it, Draper Doyle?” he said, looking around the room. “U r in church. The word ‘church’ means nothing unless u r in it.” (Johnston 1998, 81)

What mystifies Draper is the banality and inanity of Seymour’s wordplay, not any failure to understand that “CH were the letters with which the words ‘church’ began and ended” (81). Uncle Seymour’s verbal games pale against Uncle Reginald’s wit, and Seymour’s lack of wit and levity evinces the dispositional gulf between the two uncles. Draper, meanwhile, immediately “considered that UR stood for Uncle Reginald” (81), indicating imaginative fecundity as he searches for an escape route leading to his more playful, perceptive, and helpful uncle.

Unlike Seymour, Reginald is an unabashed hockey fan, one who happily devotes entire oralysis sessions to talking about the Montreal Canadiens with Draper. While watching Hockey Night in Canada, he wears a Habs sweater with Maurice Richard’s number 9, while Draper, from a younger generation, wears Jean Béliveau’s number 4. (Donald Draper, significantly and appropriately for someone trapped in eternity, appears in “a numberless Habs uniform” [158].) When Mary accuses her brother of being a hockey “fanatic” for hating other teams, Reginald nips an argument in the bud by serving up a witty definition: “A fanatic,” he explains, “is a fan who is so crazy you have to keep him in the attic” (72–73).⁶ Such self-deprecation—after all, Reginald lives in the attic—is foreign to Phil or Seymour and demonstrates the kindlier uncle’s playful, tolerant approach to life.

When Aunt Phil and Uncle Seymour mock the Maple Leafs, Uncle Reginald jestingly adopts their viewpoint that hockey is a surrogate religious war against Protestants. Reginald’s aim, it seems, is to warn Draper against religious bigotry. Aunt Phil, Sister Louise, and Father Seymour, meanwhile, see the Canadiens as an extension of their church: “None of them had any real affection for hockey. As far as they were concerned, God had created hockey for the sole purpose of allowing Catholics to humiliate Protestants on nationwide TV” (76). Uncle Reginald does not openly refute this delusion. Rather, he pokes fun at the simplistic allegorizing of hockey as a “holy war” that pits “the Heathen Leafs against the Holy Habs” (77, 78).⁷ According to Reginald, “the real coach of the Montreal Canadiens was the pope, who was sending Toe Blake instructions from the Vatican, where he and his cardinals were watching the game on closed-circuit television” (78). Reginald’s tale exemplifies his teaching method: funny on its own, it also exposes the absurdity of viewing hockey as a religious war. Like Draper’s deceased father (but with more humour), Reginald playfully teaches and delights as he nudges Draper away from Aunt Phil’s moralistic intolerance.

FORCED PLAY: A DISTORTION OF BALANCE AND MEASURE

Aunt Phil and Father Seymour’s game-watching habits reveal a deficiency: they constantly use games and humour as a means to an end. They are all but incapable of playing or amusing themselves or ushering cheer into a room. Though games and play require competition (agon), we enjoy them most when they are spiced with frivolity, looseness, or levity; focusing too much on competition leads to agony (Golden 1998, xi). The key to enjoyment in sports is balance and measure, and this need for balance extends to moderation of passions. Yes, we have to abide by the rules when we play, and, yes, we have to play seriously by giving ourselves up to the game (Connor 2011, 172), but there are—or should be—limits to what we are willing to do for victory. Destroying the opponent means destroying the game, while forcing someone to play is as absurd as decreeing fun.

Aunt Phil forces Draper to give up his luxurious third-string goalie role and join Father Seymour’s “Number,” a group of orphaned boys who, under the muscularly Christian motto “Toughness of body, soundness of mind, purity of soul,” are “trained by Father Seymour in the arts of dancing, singing, and [. . .] boxing” (Johnston 1998, 14). Uncle Reginald dubs the group “a cross between the Vienna Boys’ Choir and the Hitler Youth” (14). The comparison to the Hitler Youth is grotesquely exaggerated, but it does encapsulate the general mood in Phil’s house.⁸ Draper, though not an orphan, is soon yoked to Father Seymour’s Number and is learning to sing and box (although he is spared the ignominy of tap dancing, defined by Reginald as “the art of making an irritating sound with one’s feet” [30]). By forcing Draper to participate in boxing, a violent individual sport, Father Seymour ignores the primary condition of play—namely, that it be voluntary. As Johan Huizinga writes in his seminal Homo Ludens, “Play to order is no longer play: it could at best be but a forcible imitation of it” (Huizinga 1950, 7). For Draper, neither boxing nor singing is anything like play: he never loses himself in the autotelic world of the boxing ring, nor does he give himself over to the creative vocal enjoyment of choral singing.

In a rare moment of wit, Uncle Seymour weds boxing and choral singing to jest, at Draper’s expense. “‘Remember,’ Father Seymour said, ‘when the bell rings, come out singing.’” He assures Draper that his singing would be sure to put his opponent “down for the count with a combination of shrieking off-key notes” (Johnston 1998, 36). Father Seymour’s joke, though stale, is funny. It is also formally similar to how Uncle Reginald teases Draper for being “that unheard-of luxury, the third goalie” (17). Unskilled and not needed on the ice, with no room for him even on the bench, the would-be goalie Draper watches his team from the stands, like a common spectator. Reginald calls him “Draper Doyle, plainclothes goalie” or “Draper Doyle, undercover goalie” (17). So what is the difference between the two teasing uncles? One uncle’s teasing is a sign of love, a Nerf dart shot in kind, soothing intimacy; the other uncle demeans Draper in front of his peers, who, as Draper recalls, “roared with laughter” (36). Seymour’s aim is to publicly humiliate, not to spur development and confidence.

Father Seymour’s extreme competitiveness unmasks itself during his Number’s boxing matches against boys from a Protestant club. Not content with mere victory, and apparently oblivious to how sports can bring rival communities and warring factions together, Seymour aims to humiliate his Number’s young opponents. As Draper soon realizes, “For Father Seymour, a fight was not really ‘won’ unless a moral victory came with it. The point was not so much to win as to make the other fighter so resentful of your skill, of your ability to hit him in the face, that he would resort to unfair tactics” (140). This overly competitive mentality is a corruption of any sportsmanship or fair play, since morality itself becomes a combative game of one-upmanship. In Seymour’s ideal sporting scenario, his Number’s Protestant opponents are compelled to cheat not in hopes of winning—which would entail still being in the game-world—but to forestall a beating. According to Seymour’s curious logic of analogy, a child boxer’s despair within the ring somehow confirms the weak ways of his form of Christianity.⁹ Though Seymour’s mindset does not justify Seymour’s philosophy as a boxing coach, it does admittedly fit into a long and proud tradition of looking down on other religions, on “others,” so to speak.

Aunt Phil, meanwhile, shows her attitude toward gamesmanship in a contest with her own family. Her sporting nadir is far from the locker room; it involves a laundry room. At one point, Draper, Mary, and their mother raid the Ryan laundry hamper (the room is usually kept under lock and key) and parade around in Aunt Phil’s bra and Uncle Seymour’s underpants. Aunt Phil happens upon them and, understandably, objects to the “riot of fun” (44). Who wants to see her own bra worn on someone’s head “like one of those caps pilots wore in World War II” (44)? Though livid, Aunt Phil seems admirably composed when she puts an end to the hijinks and exits the room. Her next move fits the logic of impromptu games and competition, but it is unleavened by any sense of fair play, moderation, or tolerance. She pins Draper’s “pee-stained underwear to the bulletin board in the kitchen,” along with a cruel note: “I will not wash such filth” (45). That the soiled undies are on the bulletin board sends a clear message about who is in charge of the joyless household. As Draper realizes, “Aunt Phil had gotten her revenge. She had not only humiliated us, she had made us the instruments of our own humiliation” (45). Her revenge, however, displays an utter lack of equal measure.

Aunt Phil scars her nephew emotionally: when he sees his underwear publicly manifested, Draper thinks, “It might have been my little boy’s soul that was hanging there” (45). Her desire to win, like Uncle Seymour’s odiously competitive ways at the boxing tournament, eerily combines agon and a love of public shaming. This sort of play is the very opposite of how kindly Uncle Reginald uses humour and hockey to help his young nephew cope in difficult times and to coax him towards adolescence and understanding. If Aunt Phil had her way, her house would be a play- and laughter-free zone, with rooms controlled by what Uncle Reginald calls a “dehumourizer” (166). Without Reginald’s influence, Draper’s world would be uniformly intolerant and intolerable, with or without games. Nowhere is Aunt Phil and Uncle Seymour’s win-at-all-costs mentality more obvious than when they are involved in games. Instead of the measured tit-for-tat logic of games, theirs is a vengeful I’ll-crush-you-for-that.

CONCLUSION

If a still-common slight against sports is that they are a trivial undertaking and a great distraction from more serious topics, The Divine Ryans shows that not to be the whole story. Indeed, Johnston’s novel belongs to the contemporary canon of fine sports-related fiction precisely because he explores the many possibilities sports offer in our lives, including hockey-related opportunities for a child’s intellectual growth. Ignoring the tried-and-true hockey narrative about who will win the Cup (alas, not the Habs in this case), The Divine Ryans thematically intertwines reading and play, while also sounding the boundaries of the play spirit, over-seriousness, and even the moral aspects of instrumentalism. Near the end of the novel, Draper expresses disbelief in the “notion that, although the Habs had just lost the Cup, the world was going on as usual” (192). But, thanks especially to Uncle Reginald and his play spirit, the world does go on, with Draper now equipped to play a mature role in it as he and his family board an airplane to their new lives.

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